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Experience is key.
A few things have changed this week.
First being that Egghead was removed from our squad and placed back on to road patrol for his Officer Safety issues along with his horrible driving skills and basic inability to keep up with the rest of the unit.
Secondly, we got a guy transfered to our squad thats been on about 10 years. He hasn’t been in a jump-out squad yet and just got to the district a few months ago at best, but thats correctable.
He’s a fairly proactive guy so we’ve been getting him right into the thick of ‘it’.
We’ve been doing jumps on this apartment complex sort of hidden in the back corner of our district, targeting the drug apartments (where they grow and sell) and some robbery subjects we know stay in the same set of apartments.
This weeks target has been a guy we call ‘Dread’ due to his style of clothing, hair and whatnot. He happens to sell the ‘best’ weed in our district according to several dealers we’ve arrested in the past for months.
Let me describe the apartment complex in better detail so you can get a visual in your head.
The section of the district the apartments are in is only accessible from one road leading into this area, barriers of canal block it off north, east and south side, leaving only a two lane road in and out of this residential neighborhood. Its a total of 8 blocks north and south about about 11 avenues east and west, all jammed in this space.
The apartment complex is smack in the center on the north end of the land mass.
Basically, road patrol units rarely go inside this area unless they’re dispatched on a call to it.
We decided we’ll make it our small side project to hit this same complex every single day until the people inside of it are out of weed to sell and guns to tote around.
So far, almost every day this week I’ve gotten a body out of it.
Tuesday, the unit rolled in ‘hot’ and we split up into pairs of two.
I was with Chocolate bear and we had the first alcove as ours. The minute we hit the corner we saw ‘Dread’. He didn’t see us until we were about 15 feet away and he snatched up his bag of Marijuana (50 grams give or take) and ran back to his apartment on the bottom floor, 5 feet from where he was selling his weed..
Not a bad idea, sell in front of your own apartment to make a quick ‘get away’.
Normally, that’ll stop an Officer from pursuit because half don’t know the law enough.
Not this fella, he had a felony amount of Marijuana and took flight upon sight of an Officer. That means he’s a fleeing felon and I had ‘Fresh pursuit’.
Me and Chocolate bear got to him just as he slammed his door shut and hit the first set of what sounded like 5 dead bolts.
Well, needless to say, my foot was the next sound made at the door.
BOOM, BOOM BOOM…
Man this door sure wasn’t going to give and those locks weren’t moving. I gave it another 15 tries before I decided to give up and simply tow his car which was improperly parked.
Wednesday we repeated the same process. We were going to ‘push the fire’ onto Dread, maybe he’d feel the burn.
Turning that same corner I spotted some kid that looked way out of place. He had the inner city look about him, but not the ‘area’ look. He also happened to be standing about 20 feet from Dreads now ‘half cracked’ door. As soon as he saw us he decided to ‘shuffle step’ away.
He didn’t get very far as usual and I stopped him and got him on the wall.
He had in his right front jean pocket a loaded 9mm Taurus PT111.
Click Click, cuffs flew on him and the search incident to arrest for Carrying a Concealed Firearm proceeded.
Left pocket contained +/- 15 grams of Purple Haze Marijuana. A rarity where I work.
After some talking too, the gentlemen informed me he was waiting for Dread to come outside and sell him some more Purple Haze because its the best weed he’s ever smoked.
Hmm..
Thursday I decided to change the jump spot for the day, give the guys at the apartments the impression that we’d had out fill.
“Big Boys” was the location on the map today. Normally there are 15-20 people loitering outside the store, playing some form of card game or dominoes on a fold up table.
We rolled in hot and I saw plenty of familiar faces. There were four people playing dominoes on a fold up table and another 10 standing around aimlessly.
My unit got everyone except the dominoes players up and onto the wall.
I knew those guys were all going to be okay, they normally don’t have anything. It was the 2 new guys I’ve never seen playing dominoes that troubled me.
I looked at the oldest one, about 22-25. Looked him up and down from the side. He was trying very hard to be invisible, as best one can be invisible while out in the open. I suppose I can understand why though.
Hard to pretend like everything is okay when you have a large bag containing a lot of small baggies of cocaine sticking out of the sock that just happens to be facing the Officer looking you up and down.
“Hey partner, get up and come join the party over here. You’ll be alright just relax and have a seat on the end”
Remember, its all about how you talk to people.
I sat him down and told him to take off his shoes. He looked at me funny and then started looking around for places to run to when he took off.
Before he had the chance to think more about running, I informed him that he’s to fat to get away from me and running would only make him goto jail tired and slightly injured. He decided not to run.
“Okay, now that that’s over with, go ahead and hand me bag of Dimes” (A ‘Dime’ is the slang term for $10 worth of Marijuana or Cocaine, usually a baggie of Cocaine is $10 worth at minimum).
He handed it to me without much more then some grunting.
“Alrighty, lean forward”
He did and I cuffed him, stood him up and started walking him to my car.
The sun reflected off of the back of his thick full dreads when I noticed the object hitting my eyes with light was a corner of some nickel bags of weed sticking out. He stashed some weed bags into his hair. I haven’t seen that done in a few months, but got 6 baggies out of the dreads. (Which is fairly gross, being its smelly, greasy and unclean all around).
Good deal, took that and headed to the station. Charged him with the Possession of Cocaine / Marijuana with Intent to sell and confiscated the $59.00 in his pockets.
The new guy on the squad got a good run around for the week. We’ll see how he pans out in the future.
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